That Liverpool Girl (39 page)

Mel swallowed and dried her eyes. ‘What am I expected to do now, Mam?’

‘Stay away from him.’

‘Mother!’

‘I know, I know. Some men I’ve had to avoid because I desired them. When I met Keith, I knew he was right. At the same time, another man appealed to my baser nature, so I stopped seeing that man. He happens to be married.’

‘You saw him this morning.’

Thrown for a moment, Eileen paused.

‘Peter heard something. It was Dr Bingley, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you wanted to—’

‘Yes. But no longer. Keith is right for me. And I’m thirty-four, Mel, so I have three decades under my belt. You are wading in treacherous waters. Have a baby, and it’s all over. Your ambitions will curl and dry up like a pile of dead leaves. By the time you reach my age, your child could be your age or older. Say you had him or her at fifteen – you’d be only thirty and mother to a hormonal kiddy. Just stop it. I don’t want to upset you, but you know I’m making sense.’

So they sat holding hands, Mel sobbing from time to time, Eileen simply being where she was needed. She would be needed downstairs shortly for Miss Morrison’s bed bath, but Mel was important. The girl had to see sense; for once, the younger should heed the experience of the older. Eileen sighed. The trouble with life was that parents limped through and watched their progeny making mistakes. The parents had made the same mistakes, but the young refused to listen. They had to learn via their own errors. Mel was too pretty; in her day, Eileen had been the prettiest girl in school, so she knew about having her head turned, having the boys look and whisper and wonder who would be first to get under the clothing.

‘I can’t not see him,’ Mel said at last.

‘Then I can’t put a burden like this on my mother’s shoulders. She’s not young enough to make you keep your knickers on. I can’t have her breaking down from worrying over you. Which means I must stay, Keith will lose his job because he won’t leave me, so he’ll have to carry on as a labourer with Liverpool builders. And your grandmother will have to stay permanently at Willows, all so that you and Peter Bingley might be stopped. I shall stop you. I am telling you now, Mel, if I have to tie you up, I will. If I have to break Peter’s legs, I bloody will. I am not having you throw away Cambridge just for a stupid carry-on with a boy.’

‘I love him.’

‘And what is love, Mel? Rolling about on a floor till the bombs come? Being lumbered with a child when you’re just a kid yourself? Watching Peter going off to Cambridge while you stay at home and boil nappies?’

‘So now you hate me too.’

Eileen shrugged. ‘Not at all. I love you, and I know what the word means. I love you enough to make appointments with the head teachers of both schools. I love you enough to ensure your safety. Whatever it takes, Mel. Whatever it takes.’ She kissed her daughter and left the room.

The bombing of Liverpool, though toned down by distance, had kept the boys awake and terrified until after five in the morning. For the first time, the city had endured over twelve hours of intermittent bombardment. Crosby was untouched, but the night had still been frightening for Phil and Rob, who were used now to the quiet of the countryside. Gone was the recklessness that had sent them back to Scotland Road on second-hand bicycles; it had been replaced by a healthy determination to survive and thrive. Although Phil wanted to record the damage, he no longer wanted to live or die among it.

By the time Tom had driven just a few hundred yards, both boys were fast asleep in the back seat.

Nellie glanced sideways at the handsome, well-dressed driver. He still had strong feelings for Eileen, but the girl shouldn’t be around for much longer, which was just as well, because this chap was a selfish and decided creature who was capable of just about anything to achieve his own way. Nellie needed to persuade her daughter to do the swap no matter what Mel was up to. Nellie could deal with Mel. And this fellow would deal with his son, or the dockers would be back. But she wouldn’t talk about that now, since the boys might wake, and it wasn’t their business.

‘What did the Germans get last night?’ she asked. ‘Apart from the street we lived in. I know they hit that, because my friend’s house is gone, and our Mel and your Peter were up to no good inside it.’ She lowered her tone at the end of the sentence.

‘Quite.’ He told her what he knew. The docks had been thoroughly battered yet again, while people in shelters had inhaled the scent of their Christmas dinners being cremated in a nearby covered meat market. A chemical factory in Hanover Street had provided a giant firework display, and an electric power station had been disabled. ‘The fire service saved St George’s Hall, thank goodness. It was heavily fire-bombed. When places like that disappear, people lose heart.’

Nellie delivered her firmly held belief that nothing at all would quench the wrath of Liverpudlians. ‘We don’t need nothing,’ she told him. ‘As long as we have a bite to eat and a cup of tea, we’ll fight. That’s nothing to do with buildings.’ She looked at him again. It was plain that this fellow was no proper Scouser. ‘You’ve no idea, have you? We’re different down there. The Liver Birds would be missed, like, but we can put up with most things. Strong, you see. Not all fur coats and no knickers. My Eileen’s as tough as old boots. She may look like one of Cinderella’s glass slippers, but she’s tanned leather underneath. Keith can manage her, but he’s just about the only man who can. She’s difficult when she wants to be, so he puts her in her place.’

‘On the draining board?’

‘Sometimes, yes. Or in a cage under the table. She’ll never best him, you know. But if anything happened to her, he’d kill.’

He heard the warning, and took heart from it, because it possibly meant that he was in with a chance. Not yet, of course; not while she was carrying a child. Almost seamlessly, he picked up where he had left off. The best-loved Catholic church in Liverpool, Our Lady and St Nicholas, had been gutted. In Anfield, seventy-four had perished in a direct hit on a shelter, while two infirmaries and a school had been bombed. ‘Countless houses. Relentless,’ he concluded. ‘They are bloody determined, because they know we have weaponry on the docks.’

‘How do they know?’ she asked. ‘It’s not the only city with docks.’

‘Spies. English people who support the Nazis.’

Nellie wasn’t having that. ‘Load of rubbish,’ she said. ‘There’s no spies down in real Liverpool. Though in my experience, all men will do anything to get what they want, even if they don’t have a use for it and don’t deserve it. Germans who fly planes and drop bombs are men. They don’t need spies, because they can see everything from up there in the sky once they’ve set fire to a few things. Well, I say men should all be locked up, let women take over for a while. We make things like babies, homes and dinners. Men destroy our work.’

Tom changed the subject, asked how she liked the countryside and would she stay there after the war.

‘I well might. You get used to the quiet after a few months; you even get used to cows, pigs and all that. The air’s so fresh it cuts into your chest, and the people are much the same as anywhere, really. Once you get used to them talking funny, it’s all right. I tell you what, though. I said we’d make Liverpool and back in a day, and I’ll never forget my stupid stubbornness. We might not have got home at all except for you.’

He choked on a chuckle, turned it into a cough. Nellie had a true Scouse accent. If something wasn’t fair, it wasn’t
fur
. If a woman got a new fur coat, it was a
fair
coat. Words that ended in ck came out so guttural that they sounded German, vowels were broadened to destruction, and an interpreter would have been useful at times. And here she sat complaining about inner Lancashire’s flattened tones. He wondered how the people of Willows fared when trying to make out what she was saying. She was a character. She had thumped him, but he couldn’t help admiring her.

‘I was needed,’ she continued. ‘The odd job man’s gone odder than ever, in hospital with diabetes and hypo-thermals.’

‘Hypothermia.’

‘Yes, that’s what I said. So poor Elsie’s been stuck with his wife what’s had a baby and gone all peculiar. Started talking to herself, you know.’

‘Whose wife?’

‘Jay. The one in Phil’s drawing. Odd job man. See, he starts smelling of acid tone and—’

‘Acetone.’

Nellie grinned. This one hadn’t yet picked up on the fact that she twisted words deliberately. ‘Yeah, that as well. So our Phil shoves a barley sugar in his mouth and tells him to sit down while his level climbs up again. But our Phil wasn’t there. And I promised, said I’d be back last night, because we’ve no idea up at Willows, you see. I mean, we’ve got Land Army, and you can’t slaughter a pig without a papal blessing and three forms filled in – oh, and you have to grow loads of vegetables – but war? We see nothing up there. So I said I’d be back, but I wasn’t, because we don’t think. I mean we know it’s happening, but it’s not real when you’re as safe as we are. I let them down. I kept Phil away, too.’

‘Not your fault.’

She sniffed. ‘Well, if I’d never come, our Phil would never have come. And if our Phil had never come, Jay wouldn’t have ended up face down in a horse trough with icy water in it. He’s got delicate constitutionals with all this sugar and everything. I mean, he was daft to start with, but he’s gone worse.’

Life was always more complicated once Nellie Kennedy entered the arena. She had a quick mind, an explosive temper, and an advanced sense of humour, but she was not particularly well organized in the verbal department. Yet he sensed that had she been on the receiving end of an education, she might have been dangerous, especially in the field of politics or unions. ‘So he’s in hospital?’

‘Yes. So that meant the post office was closed.’

He was losing the thread again. ‘Oh, I see.’ He didn’t see at all.

‘Because Elsie stayed at the gatehouse and waited to see if Gill got back from hospital last night. She’s not been herself. Gill, I mean, not Elsie. She had to mind the baby, did Elsie, and she’s not fond of kids. And the lamp oil man was coming to make a delivery to the post office. So Freda Pilkington what lived in Rachel Street had to accept the lamp oil for Elsie and put it in the shed. She took Kitty’s place, you see. Kitty what killed her kiddies and hanged herself upstairs. You remember her? All teeth, she was, God rest her.’

‘Yes.’ He had never forgotten poor Kitty with her smelly house, empty eyes, dead husband and no hope. ‘So the house meant for Kitty and her children went to Freda.’

‘Pilkington, yes. Her man’s in the army, and she’s a decent soul, so we brought her here. Right, stop now and have a look.’

He stopped.

‘That’s our Eileen’s house. Well, it’s Keith’s, but this is where they’ll be living. There’s Freda’s, then the one with the post box is Elsie’s. She’s my friend. These cottages are all Home Farm tied. People what live in them work at Home Farm or Willows – that’s the house. Then there’s Four Oaks, Cedars, Pear Tree and Holly farms. They pay rent to Miss Pickavance, cos they’re what’s called tenanted holdings. It was her house down Scottie Road what my granddaughter and your son was messing about in. She lived at number one, then she inherited all this lot.’

‘Fascinating.’ Tom felt as if he had entered some parallel universe where things were nearly the same, but not quite. Apart from his companion’s disjointed meanderings, these rolling hills were beautiful, while people who lived on the Mersey plain led the flatter life, no movement in the land, no dry stone walls, no dales. But he could not countenance a life without the river, so he probably was a true Liverpudlian. ‘So what do you do all day?’ he asked.

‘Every-bloody-thing. See, Miss Pickavance has to be Miss Millichamp.’

‘Yes?’ It was happening again.

‘Miss Millichamp had a hacadamy in Liverpool what Hilda went to when she was a kiddy. Now, this here Miss Millichamp never caned nobody. She just got so saddened over bad behaviour that the kiddies were upset. So Hilda – Miss Pickavance – pretends to be Miss Millichamp and she teaches school for the ones from Liverpool that wouldn’t fit into real school. She does that in the morning in the afternoon room. I help. Because them hard-faced little buggers from Scottie need a thump sometimes, and she won’t give ’em one, so I do it.’

He turned into Willows Lane. ‘You’re a professional thumper, then.’

‘Yeah. And I supervise cleaners in the house, help Elsie in the post office, do a bit for her because she’s too fat to clean right. I bake, do washing, light fires, clean windows – you name it, I do it.’

He asked whether Eileen would be expected to do the same after the change-about, and Nellie answered in the affirmative. Her Eileen didn’t go to bits when pregnant. In fact, she could probably scrub a floor half an hour after giving birth, because she came from good stock. ‘Strong bones, you see. It’s the Irish in us.’

So this was where Eileen would be living with her much-loved husband. There would be no electricity, no gas, no decent plumbing. Lamplight would suit her, as would the shimmering flames from logs on an open fire. There was, no doubt, a thriving black market in meat, there were fresh vegetables, plenty of eggs and an abundance of untainted air. She would thrive here. Yet he hoped she would not become ruddy-cheeked, because her porcelain skin and delicate features were perfect as they were. This was supposed to have stopped. Hypnotherapy was helpful, but not a complete answer. Anyway, the fellow she had married was strong, so was it worth dying just for one chance with Eileen? Did he know the answer to that question?